for anyone who doesn’t watch Vampire Diaries, here’s all you need to know:

This chick in the middle is “in love” with lame good-boy brother on the left, but the reason we all keep watching it is because she just might be the only person that evil bad-boy brother on the right is vulnerable to.

Seriously. That’s it.

And the thing I love about the show is that Damon really is bad. After last season it looked like the writers might have wussed out a bit with him – you know, he really has a good heart, etc. But this season’s opener took care of that: He broke Elena’s brother’s neck when she rejected him.

So the brother was wearing a magic ring that brought him back to life, but Damon didn’t know that.

And then just as it looks like he’s getting a bit too “good” again, in the latest episode he rips a werewolf’s heart out of his chest – after some good old fashioned torture. The werewolf wasn’t even really a bad guy, just in with the wrong lady.

To me, this is really good writing.

A bad boy has so much currency – but so many writers try to use that currency without paying what it’s worth. They have a “bad” hero, whose inner motivations are pure as snow. Who protects and shows his – albeit reluctant – worth.

The only problem is, to have someone be bad they have to actually, er, do bad stuff. My teacher’s constantly pulling me up on how unlikeable my heroine is, and whilst I think it’s something to watch, I also think: Well, yeah, she’s not a very nice person right now.

I recently came to an agreement with blogger Decadence that we’re very different readers, because of how differently we reacted to a heroine doing something “bad” in one of the Black Dagger Brotherhood books. For Decadence this made her unworthy of being the hero’s mate.

For me, it meant I could trust the character because she wasn’t just a hard person as a separate thing to any of her actions.